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Cookies are just completely broken. The EU should never have got involved in the way that it did. No matter how positive the intentions, the web is a worse expe

by axg11 4y ago

Cookies are just completely broken. The EU should never have got involved in the way that it did. No matter how positive the intentions, the web is a worse experience as a result, with marginal privacy gains.

zasdffaa 4y ago
> Cookies are just completely broken In what way? > The EU should never have got involved in the way that it did Maybe, can you explain where it failed. > the web is a worse experience as a result That's debatable > with marginal privacy gains can you quantify that? Myself, I turn off all JS and nix all cookies (with about the only temporary exceptions being for posting on HN). WFM.
dmitriid 4y ago
> the web is a worse experience as a result, with marginal privacy gains. The web is a worse experience because of companies like Google and IAB willingly breaking the law. But sure, blame the law.
- hedora 4y ago
  I'm really hoping Do Not Track becomes legally binding. (Also, how is it not already treated like a piece of a contract negotiation? It is machine readable and sent on every request. Hidden website EULA's are already treated like contracts.)
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    DNT is deprecated and now removed from all browsers because it was ironically used for fingerprinting and tracking.
Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
The focus on cookies was always a bit off and more a result of too much technical detail resulting in laws missing their intent. The legislative moves slowly, over time, this will be fixed. However the legislative regulating how webservices have to handle data privacy was very necessary (and the people of the USA should really consider amending their constitution by also demanding a basic human right to data privacy). The key elements are "informed choice" and "consent to data gathering/processing" which have little to do with cookies. Let's say you buy a smartphone from china and it comes with a keyboard app that sends all your inputs to a chinese company so they can make predictions and offer autocompletion. You kind of want that app to display a banner asking you if that is okay. And you kind of want a privacy policy attached that explains they will create user specific profiles and sell them to advertisers and share them with the chinese ministry of state security. I think you want that banner. Now google analytics isn't much different. It tracks you all over the web, creates profiles of your browsing habits, sells those to advertisers and shares them with the american national security agency. Sure it also shows statistics to the website owners, the same way that keyboard app has an autocomplete function, but you kind of want to be informed about those other functions and have the option to say no, don't you? That is why 'consent management' is so important for data privacy.
nofunsir 4y ago
We.don’t.care.about.experience. We care about privacy. I would rather use Lynx than any more creepy JavaScript. When I want “experience” —- a concept I loathe because it is a euphemism in all senses, and somehow arrogant and naive at the same time. —- that is the role of a desktop program. And it better ask me and inform me whenever it wants to perform a network request.

by axg11 4y ago

zasdffaa 4y ago

> Cookies are just completely broken In what way? > The EU should never have got involved in the way that it did Maybe, can you explain where it failed. > the web is a worse experience as a result That's debatable > with marginal privacy gains can you quantify that? Myself, I turn off all JS and nix all cookies (with about the only temporary exceptions being for posting on HN). WFM.

dmitriid 4y ago

> the web is a worse experience as a result, with marginal privacy gains. The web is a worse experience because of companies like Google and IAB willingly breaking the law. But sure, blame the law.

hedora 4y ago
I'm really hoping Do Not Track becomes legally binding. (Also, how is it not already treated like a piece of a contract negotiation? It is machine readable and sent on every request. Hidden website EULA's are already treated like contracts.)
- dmitriid 4y ago
  DNT is deprecated and now removed from all browsers because it was ironically used for fingerprinting and tracking.

Jon_Lowtek 4y ago

The focus on cookies was always a bit off and more a result of too much technical detail resulting in laws missing their intent. The legislative moves slowly, over time, this will be fixed. However the legislative regulating how webservices have to handle data privacy was very necessary (and the people of the USA should really consider amending their constitution by also demanding a basic human right to data privacy). The key elements are "informed choice" and "consent to data gathering/processing" which have little to do with cookies. Let's say you buy a smartphone from china and it comes with a keyboard app that sends all your inputs to a chinese company so they can make predictions and offer autocompletion. You kind of want that app to display a banner asking you if that is okay. And you kind of want a privacy policy attached that explains they will create user specific profiles and sell them to advertisers and share them with the chinese ministry of state security. I think you want that banner. Now google analytics isn't much different. It tracks you all over the web, creates profiles of your browsing habits, sells those to advertisers and shares them with the american national security agency. Sure it also shows statistics to the website owners, the same way that keyboard app has an autocomplete function, but you kind of want to be informed about those other functions and have the option to say no, don't you? That is why 'consent management' is so important for data privacy.

nofunsir 4y ago

We.don’t.care.about.experience. We care about privacy. I would rather use Lynx than any more creepy JavaScript. When I want “experience” —- a concept I loathe because it is a euphemism in all senses, and somehow arrogant and naive at the same time. —- that is the role of a desktop program. And it better ask me and inform me whenever it wants to perform a network request.